


Tap & Die

by Steals_Thyme (Liodain)



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Ambiguously Genderqueer, Community: seasonofkink, F/M, Gender Play, Rorschach-typical Bigotry, Rule 63, Strap-Ons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:45:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4545417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be easier for Rorschach if Nite Owl were a man. Nite Owl would probably prefer it, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tap & Die

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Season of Kink](http://seasonofkink.dreamwidth.org/) 2015, Gender Play square.

It all goes off the rails fairly early on in their partnership. He should have known it would happen. Men and women can't be friends.

It is a fatal combination: Kovacs' lust—not at all contained by Rorschach's resolute stoicism, despite what he had thought—and the weapon that is Nite Owl, her strength and aptitude and competence—not at all like his concept of a woman, despite the fact that she certainly is one.

Rorschach resents her for it: for the easy way she strips off her uniform in front of him, and because she binds her chest flat. For her practical haircut, and because she never wears makeup. He resents the solidness of her thighs and the span of her shoulders and the androgyny of her silhouette.

If she were a man it would be easier. No complications. But she is a woman, and it is only because of the natural order of things that he finds himself thinking of her inappropriately. Nothing more than a mindless, biology-driven compulsion that bothers him in his quiet moments.

He resents her, because the things he finds compelling about her are not feminine. He resents that, for all her masculine traits, she is still female. 

He resents a lot of things. He keeps it to himself for the sake of their partnership.

He's early today, and Danielle is warming up when he arrives at the Nest. Her skin gleams under the workshop fluorescents as she rests, hanging on to her punching bag while she catches her breath. Her face is bare, perspiring. Her nose and eyes scrunch up when she tries to focus on him.

"Hey, buddy," she says, vaguely in his direction. "Just give me three minutes to sluice off, then I'll be good to go, okay?" She peels the boxing wraps from her hands, fumbles about among the electronic parts littering a nearby workbench before she finds her glasses.

Rorschach follows her up the basement steps into the kitchen, intending to grab a handful of cereal or a bite of cold foreign leftovers while she's in the bathroom. He looks at the shift of her shoulder muscles as she moves her hand on the rail, and at the short hair at the nape of her neck. She is wearing a man's undershirt. Something that has been itching under Rorschach's skin finally crystallizes.

He recalls the way she smiled at the Silk Spectre, at the pointless meeting they attended last month. It's obvious, in retrospect. He wonders why he didn't make the connection sooner.

He stops in the middle of the kitchen.

"Are you a lesbian?" he asks her, before he can consider a more discreet approach. He knows he is being excessively blunt, but he doesn't really care if he offends her.

Danielle half-turns towards him. "What?" she says, laughing as though caught on the edge of embarrassment. "That's kind of a personal question."

"But you aren't denying it," he points out.

"I don't see how it's any of your business." 

She sounds defensive, and Rorschach feels an uncertain triumph. He considers reminding her about what happened to the Silhouette. Perhaps it'll encourage her to rethink her lifestyle. Probably it will just make her angry.

Danielle shakes her head and makes as though to go upstairs, but rounds on him first, hand clamped over the crown of the newel post, the other on her hip. "I like guys, too," she says. "Not that you noticed. Christ's sake, Rorschach." She blinks at him, as though she's not sure about what she just said, then takes the stairs with a stiff dignity. 

Rorschach thinks about that for a while. He doesn't like the implication and he wants to argue with her about it. He follows her up to the bathroom; she's left the door unlocked and ajar.

"You really piss me off sometimes, you know?" Danielle says. Her cheeks are red, and there's a flush creeping across her collarbones. She pulls her undershirt off over her head and unwinds the bandage that flattens her breasts. "Why do you think you can poke around in my personal life like that, huh?"

Rorschach doesn't have an answer to that. He didn't prepare a justification, since Danielle usually shares with him so unrelentingly. 

"Well?" She stands with her hands on her hips, topless. She has a strong core and only slight curves; an athlete's body. Her sweatpants sit low on her hips.

Well, Rorschach thinks, this isn't much of an argument, and reaches out to press his palm over her right nipple. Her breast is firm and warm, and barely fills his hand. There is no sudden fiery decent into hell, but he doesn't feel particularly exhilarated by it, either. 

Danielle looks at his hand, then back at his face. "I don't think you have a lot of respect for me," she says. 

"That's not true," Rorschach says, but he takes his hand back.

He's not sure if that was the right thing to do, either, because she sighs, gets a hold of his arm and says, "Come on, then," in a long-suffering way that makes him bristle. She herds him towards her bedroom. 

He dislikes how she's looking at him. It's too sympathetic, as though she finds something about him pitiable. His pride makes him shrug her hand away. He decides to sit on the bed and wait to see what she will do next, uneasiness and anticipation turning his stomach. 

He doesn't understand why all this should be arousing to him, except maybe the forthright way she's going about it. 

"So is this why you've been so pissy lately?" she asks him, thumbs hooked into the waistband of her sweats. Her confidence has faltered, and Rorschach doesn't like the display of vulnerability at all. "You thought I wouldn't be into you?"

"If that's how you want to think of it," he says. He had thought he'd kept himself courteous. Apparently not enough. 

"You're ridiculous," she says. "Some detective. You gonna keep your clothes on?"

She seems enamored of the idea. He finds that unacceptable, so he sets his hat aside and starts unfastening his clothes. He is intractably Rorschach even when he's Kovacs, but it does help him gain some distance from himself. 

Danielle kicks her sweatpants off into a heap on the floor. She's wearing boxer briefs. Rorschach is utterly unsurprised.

He's starting to swell, an involuntary reaction to Danielle's increasing nakedness, he assumes. An ugly bulge rucks his underwear. They look yellowed and unpleasant against the bright white of Danielle's bedsheets. He feels small and grubby and more ashamed of himself as this goes on.

Still, he doesn't feel inclined to stop. It helps, even, coats his morals in an oilslick, makes them amorphous and vague.

Danielle stands in front of him, and takes his hands, guides them to her waist. Her hipbones crest into his cupped palms. There is a light dusting of hair in a trail below her navel that thickens as she slides his hands down, thumbs caught in the waistband of her boxers. He can't look at the dark V at the split of her legs. His hands are frozen against the outside of her thighs. 

He closes his eyes and takes a breath, feels his face muscles tic; he can smell her. 

He must have stayed like that for some time, because Danielle eventually sighs, and says, "You aren't really attracted to me, are you?" 

She sounds more curious than annoyed, and Rorschach almost wishes she would shout at him instead, push him away. He could say some things that would make her do that. It would be easy.

"I am," he says, instead. He has that much respect for her, at least. He tries to articulate his problem. "Just not for the reasons you think."

She makes a thoughtful noise, and she's inspecting him closely when he dares glance up. How to explain that he is attracted by her strength and tenacity, her dedication to their pursuit of justice? That they are brothers in arms, bound together by their blood in the streets and their blood on each others hands, and to him, that's stronger than any pointless romance they could contrive?

Instead, he places his hand flat against her abdomen, etches the defined muscle there with his fingertips, feels it flutter and tense. He has a sudden, humiliating insight into his own proclivities. "I don't want," he begins, but Danielle's face has lit up, eyes raptorial, peeling him back with an astuteness that terrifies him. "I—"

"Uh-huh," she says, with a gentle, bubbling humor, and there's a kind of relief on her face that he doesn't quite understand, spreading into her body language. "I kinda suspected you were, at least a little. You doth protest too much, sometimes."

He stares at her. His hands remain where he left them. 

"Alright then," she says, slowly. "I have an idea."

She opens her nightstand, and untangles something from the debris in the drawer, something that's mostly straps and buckles. She fits it over her hips, between her legs—it's a harness—and then she turns away from him, taking her time as she selects something. Rorschach is certain that things are about to take a turn for the deviant, but it feels far too late to dredge up the necessary disapprobation. 

When Danielle turns back to him, she has a penis.

It's an obnoxious magenta, jutting from her groin. She runs her hand over it idly, self-conscious only because they both know it's rubber. "If I'm honest with you, I'm not really into being—" she makes an obscene gesture, pushing a finger into her fist. "You know. Uh. I'm not into dicks that aren't mine, I guess. That work for you?"

Rorschach tries to come up with a coherent response, and fails. Within a span of heartbeats he is miserably hard. 

Danielle's smile is a sharp crescent. She touches him on his shoulder, makes him sprawl back and lift his hips so she can slide his underwear off, down his thighs and over his bony knees. She runs her hand down the inside of his leg as she does so, petting him. He marvels at how reasonable that seems.

Rorschach doesn't like to be touched, on the whole. He has a particular defensiveness over his personal space. Nite Owl has never seemed cognizant of that, and until now, Rorschach has been unaware of how significantly her casual, friendly touches has eroded his physical boundaries.

A hand on his shoulder does not seem so different to a hand on his thigh, though it's reassuring to know she isn't interested in putting her hands anywhere more intimate.

Danielle straightens up. Her cock—and he's satisfied calling it that; it's too ridiculous an imitation to necessitate being detached about it—bobs with her movements, and Rorschach sits up and leans so he can rub the tip of it against his cheek. It slides over his mask, friction gripping the fabric and shifting it against his skin underneath. His face feels hot; his breath is humid where it's trapped against the latex.

"Oh, wow," Danielle murmurs. She grips herself at the base with one hand, cups his jaw with the other, and guides her cock to his mouth.

He wonders if this can be considered homosexual behavior, and decides that it's not, since Danielle is a woman. Somehow, it doesn't make him feel any better.

He accepts it delicately, latex stretching as he parts his lips. The head pushes against his tongue and she thrusts shallowly against the unyielding tension of his mask. All he can taste is himself.

"Hey, can I—" Danielle slips her fingers under the edge of his mask and rolls it up to the bridge his nose; he has a moment of alarm when he thinks she's going to try to kiss him, but she doesn't. She just presents herself to him again, hands sliding over the curve of his skull.

He pulls his lips back from his teeth, and she lets out a desperate little noise that makes his stomach drop and his blood slam through him. He takes her into his mouth before he can think too much about it. His pulse judders in his throat, makes it hard to breathe evenly.

Her cock is warm, though it tastes too sterile, completely unlike skin. Rorschach is compelled to try his teeth in it, so he sinks in as deep as he can. There's not enough give to find it satisfying.

Danielle's hips twitch, and she catches her breath as though it's her flesh he's biting into. "Damn," she breathes, extricating herself. "That's fucked up." It doesn't sound like that bothers her in particular. In fact, Rorschach suspects her deviant streak runs even deeper than he anticipated. She pushes him back on the bed and looms over him, straddling his hips. She's molten against him, and wet, and hard alongside his own hardness. 

One of his hands is gathering into the sheets. He wraps his other hand around them both, and tugs. Danielle arches her back, pushing into his fist. He keeps it tight; it's uncomfortable, but it feels safer to keep on that knife-edge of pain, and it's liberating to know he won't hurt her at all. The clinging friction-heat reminds him of the way Nite Owl's uniform sometimes drags against his palms whenever he has to peel her open and stitch her up. He catches a groan in his throat, swallows it back.

She braces one arm across his collarbone and leans her weight on it. Her other hand is working between their bodies—between her legs—and when she runs her hand over her cock, and Rorschach's fingers, it's slick.

She shifts her hips again, and everything glides. Rorschach chokes down on a humiliating noise, despairing at the way his body contorts and wracks itself beneath her, until she flips him over and stills him against the bed, hands against his shoulder blades, pinning him flat. He buries his face in the sheets, grateful until he takes a breath; they smell of her.

"You're nothing like I thought you'd be," she says, settling herself across the back of his thighs. Her cock rests in the cleft of his buttocks, heavy and warm. Rorschach screws his eyes shut, and considers what he would do if it were real. His hair prickles at the nape of his neck, and he breaks a sweat.

"Shut up," he says. He doesn't want to hear her voice, only wants her harsh breathing and solid arms, her strong fingers on the back of his neck and the image of Nite Owl behind his eyes, tearing into him like prey.

She slaps him across his backside, light and playful. "Don't talk to me like that."

He is paralyzed with indignation. His face burns. If she wasn't sitting on him, he tells himself, he would get up and leave. "Please," he says, tersely. He is not pleading. He is not begging. "Be quiet."

She leans over, mouth close to his ear, and flattens her hand over the back of his neck. "Okay," she says, "but that means you have to make all the noise." She anchors her other hand on his lower back and slides against him with a roll of her hips. He tilts his own in mindless response and groans into the mattress. He can feel his heartbeat vibrating through the springs.

She ruts against him like that, just her breathing and tensing muscles and his increasingly loud noises; he feels over-sensitized, every nerve-end firing and the sheets are grating against him and she just keeps moving, steady like the sea, casting him onto the rocks over and over. 

He wonders, distantly, what she's getting from this, and whether it would make a difference if she were inside him. Then he thrashes briefly and comes between his stomach and her bedsheets.

He is barely conscious of her climbing off him. She pushes him up by his shoulder, rolls him onto his back. He feels sticky and limp, so he lets her. He has no shame left.

"Uhm," she says. Her face is very red and her hair is sticking up. She doubles over herself, one hand vanished in the space between her legs, the other twisting over the head of her cock. "God, look at you."

He reaches out and touches her hand, and she shudders and gasps, swears in a way that Rorschach can only describe as unladylike. He tries to resent her for it, but finds that he can't.


End file.
